I love it when old-school tabletop RPGs set forth rules for a particular activity, and the tone of the text is just “obviously this is something real roleplayers wouldn’t be interested in, but you fucking degenerates are going to do it anyway, so it’s incumbent upon me, your humble author, to make sure you at least do it right”. Like, tell us how you really feel!
I really, really want an example now
i think the most recent example I’ve run into would be the revised edition of Stars Without Number. For the most part, it sets forth a very conservative stripe of science fiction: AIs will inevitably go crazy and kill everyone, altering the human genome for any reason other than fixing congenital diseases is intrinsically wrong, socialist polities are always dystopian and corrupt, and so forth. Then it turns around and does a whole chapter on post-scarcity transhuman campaigns that’s explicitly prefaced with a lecture about how sensible players and GMs will
obviously
want nothing to do with this nonsense, after it which proceeds to set forth like seventeen pages of detailed rules for modelling reputation economies and putting your brain into a squid.
winterfireice